Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 322 Pt. 3 - Why Humans Thrive Eating Meat ft. Shawn Baker & Paul Saladino

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Why do humans thrive on a carnivore diet? In part three of this four part series, Shawn Baker and Paul Saladino share examples of people thriving on a carnivore diet and how they've been able to lose weight, reverse disease, come off medications and even help with anxiety and depression. Please go back and check out parts one and two and stay tuned for part four coming soon. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT10” at checkout for $10 off $40 or more! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject  ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject   ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok ➢Power Project Alexa Skill: http://bit.ly/ppalexa FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Hey Power Project, welcome back to part three of our four-part series with Sean Baker and Paul Saladino, two guys that are leading the way in the carnivore community. In today's installment, the two are sharing success stories from people losing weight, reversing disease, getting off medications, and how going full carnivore can actually help depression and anxiety. This episode is brought to you by Perfect Keto. When you're following a meat-based diet, you get a lot of your electrolytes from salting your food, even salting your water. But if you want to step it up a notch, Perfect Keto has these amazing electrolytes that you can take as a supplement. We like to

utilize these before and after a heavy training session. If you guys want to give these a try, head over to perfectketo.com slash powerproject at checkout, enter promo code powerproject10 for $10 off any order of $40 or more. And if you really step your game up and your order is $100, you can enter promo code PowerProjectBundle for $25 off. Again, this is part three of a four-part series. So if you missed the first two, please go back and listen and watch those and stay tuned for part four of this full conversation. Enjoy the show. Why do you guys feel that it helps you thrive so much, aside from the nourishment that you get from the macros and the micros?

Why do you guys feel like it sets your body up to get rid of things like diabetes and all these other diseases that we see? I think the absence of plant toxins is just a huge weight off your shoulders. I mean, like Sean is saying, I talk about this in my book, you know, animal foods are the ideal foods for humans and plant foods are fallback foods. They're survival foods. Well, if you never have to eat survival foods, you're always thriving. You know, if you've always got to kill, if you've always got animals, you don't need anything else, right? And if you don't have to use survival foods,

you don't get all of the toxins that come with that, all of the, you know, accompanying toxins. And I think that that makes a big difference for people, probably from an autoimmune inflammatory standpoint. I think that we talked a little bit about earlier today and maybe in one of the YouTube videos about insulin resistance and the resolution of insulin resistance. And I think that what we know about insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, which is sort of the quintessential paradigmatic example of insulin resistance, if we have mixed overfeeding of fat and carbohydrates, we run into problems. Well, you can fix that pretty easily by cutting out one of those two. Clearly, a carnivore diet is going to cut out all your carbohydrates, and it's going to probably normalize the amount of calories

you're getting, and it's going to probably remove many of the foods that are causing inflammation. In that previous video today, we were talking about inflammation can make us insulin resistant sooner for a given fat threshold at the level of our adipocytes. But I think that, you know, like we're talking about here, if you give your body a species-appropriate diet, if you give your body the ideal foods, things are going to come back in line. And insulin resistance, I think, is a disease of Western civilization, and it's a disease of discordance between genetics and environment. We're not supposed to be getting tons of fat and carbohydrates together and getting tons of extra calories of those mixed macronutrients.

We're not supposed to be getting tons of processed food that's easy to overeat that affects our incretin hormones incorrectly. When we eat processed fat or processed grains or processed carbohydrates, it completely messes with the normal sequence of incretin, which is sort of the series of hormones involved in digestion and satiety as the food goes down our guts. And so when we get to real food, number one, and then real animal food, everything kind of clicks back in line.

We get back to the normal program. They're all compatible. On your phone, you know, there's a setting you can go to to autocorrect your spelling. And I feel that the carnivore diet has helped auto-correct my need to overeat. You know, it's auto-corrected me. It's taught me that, look, man, you eat way too much food, which I already knew because the food was around my waist, you know, and I, I weighed a lot. So that was a huge, huge thing for me is that it helped with, uh, you know, teaching me, look, man, this is, you're going to get all the nutrients

that you need. You're going to get everything you need from this. And if you eat a lot of this, uh, it's going to actually be really, really hard to even eat enough of it to gain weight. It'd be very difficult in my opinion, to, to consistently for a period of time, gain weight with just meat. Yeah, no, it is challenging to be obese. I would posit it would be hard to make. I mean, there are people that gain weight on the carnivore diet, particularly we see with some menopausal women often,

because they come from this history of chronic dieting. But they don't gain 100 pounds. I mean, I would say it would be very difficult for a human being eating nothing to meet to eat eating nothing but meat to become morbidly obese i think that would probably be unless you may be going way out of your way and doing something weird well i don't i just don't think it's possible you know you can certainly that's something a good study yeah well i mean try to eat as much as you could you'd be and they've tried to do that study back and they did some studies on prisoners uh where they would overfeed these guys like pork chops. And they were like, they got to like 4,000 or 5,000 calories. They're like, I'm done.

But they did the same thing with carbohydrates and fats mixed together. And they could get 10,000 calories in them, and they would get fat. But with meat, it's very difficult to do. I think that, you know, the point about the plant toxins, you know, if we look at what we had access to as humans, and humans started arguably 2.83 million years ago with Homo habilis coming from Australopithecines, our first thing was we were, you know,

what defined us as humans was access to meat, you know, potentially scavenging initially. That's where we were getting our food from. You know, we might have still eaten some plants. You know, we likely had a common ancestor that was eating fruit and trees. And when the world got cold around five to three million years ago, dramatically changed the climate. We had to adapt. There were attempts at pre-human animals like Australopithecine, Boisei, and Robustus that went extinct because the environment no longer

supported that strategy. And as we got further and farther into hunting and at Homo erectus, we probably perfected how to kill elephants with just spirit technology. And then we had this basically unlimited animal fats because I think fat was the thing that really differentiated humans. Because when you're hunting animals, protein is easy. You're going to get all the protein you could possibly need. The fat part is going to be hard.

And that's why we started accessing marrow, eating brain, eating the organs, eating the viscera around the organs was to get the fat in there. That's what drove our development. Then the plants that we have now that we have access to, we have processed them so much. We've taken out some of the toxins. We have changed their characteristics. Sugar, for example, refined sugar and all these things that we eat now are nowhere clear, even if we had some plants. And I would argue, I don't know what Paul thinks, I think probably fruit would be the next logical step in foods that we would potentially eat just from a caloric value. And again, I point to

ease of access to calories is what drives us for nutrition proteins given if you're hunting animals you're not going to have structural problems but you got to get calories for energy to power that brain it's either going to be fat which is the easiest way or you might get carbohydrate and fruit probably being the second easiest way the starches and the tubers you would have gotten back then very fibrous very you can't eat raw you can't eat raw potatoes i mean you got to you know we'd have to yeah i've never heard it worded this way. I think that's great because, yeah, think about the impact it has when you eat like a pear or you eat like an apple.

It feels really good on your brain. Like it does something to you and something for you perhaps as opposed to like you might not be searching around for a lot of vegetables because they don't do the same thing for you. Who would eat leaves? I mean, honestly, if you're hungry and there's i got animals i got fruit i got leaves why in the f would i ever eat leaves i mean they taste bitter i mean there's a reason they taste better because most of them will kill us and if we go if we go outside randomly there's not much

here in la but if we go out randomly and start eating plants we're going to get sick we're going to probably throw up maybe we might die if we get hit the wrong one and i i wonder who the first plant tasters were i mean that was that must have been the guy no one liked you know hey hey grok go eat this damn plant you know think about that you know you're testing these things but somebody had to figure that out and we i mean to our advantage once these megafaunal animals died off and we can argue whether it's climate change or over hunting and i think probably most you know paleozeologists will say over hunting was likely the cause at least in most parts where there's some argument around a comet in north america killing off some of this stuff but i

think if you look in australia the the pacific islands europe whenever man got there the big animals went away within a few thousand years because we were so effective at killing these things and then when that happened we had a new strategy and then eventually it resulted in The big animals went away within a few thousand years because we were so effective at killing these things. And then when that happened, we had a new strategy. And then eventually it resulted in agriculture. And we got smaller, stupider, weaker. Basically, that's what happened to us. You know, since Mark's been doing the carnivore challenge, like he's been getting a lot of DMs.

Now I've been getting a lot of DMs of individuals that have lost massive amount of weight in short amounts of time. It's been crazy. But I'm actually very curious because you guys have been working with individuals doing the carnivore diet for a while now, having tons of clients. And if you're willing to share, has there been any just absolutely ridiculous potential disease reversals or just things that you would think would be kind of impossible with a diet that you'd be willing to share that that's happened to any of your clients? Oh yeah. I mean, you see some pretty striking things that really change your perspective. I think that in the education of a physician, it takes one or two cases like this, and then you never really want to believe, you know, never really the same in terms of the way

that you view pharmaceuticals and mainstream medical paradigms. But, you know, I've had clients with basically severe psychiatric illness, persistent suicidality, depression, anxiety, bipolar, bordering on psychosis, have improvements or resolution. I've had people with pretty... I'm sorry to interrupt, but were some of those people able to come off medication as well? Oh, absolutely, yeah. And then they were under your watchful eye?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That might not be a great idea to just kind of try on your own. No, I mean, you know, nobody who is suicidal should stop their medications without talking to their physicians. But you see some pretty striking things. I had a couple of clients, a pair of twin young men who said they had eczema that was so severe it was like head to toe. And the carnivore diet like completely resolved it.

I've seen psoriasis resolve. I've seen a lot of dermatologic conditions resolve, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis. I've seen a lot of people with psoriatic arthritis, which is another autoimmune disease. Yeah, pretty striking stuff. I mean, you name it. You know, rosacea. It's pretty striking. You know, basically the majority of autoimmune diseases that are out there, you've seen lupus, Sjogren's, improvements in those. I know Sean has had a podcast with somebody who has Ehlers-Danlos who have seen improvements,

which is a genetic condition having to do with collagen synthesis. So yeah, there's some pretty striking stuff. You're just like, wow, that's incredible. And it really kind of, it's tough because you forget about it, you know? You forget about the triumphs and then you quickly need to be reminded of that and think, oh, yeah, there's all these people who are doing so great. Some of the clients I have are still struggling, mostly the ones with GI issues. Recently did a podcast, did a couple of podcasts recently

on the microbiome and GI stuff, and I don't think we've got that totally figured out. Tricky to figure out. Yeah, I think for a lot of people, a carnivore diet improves IBS, gas bloating, constipation, but there's definitely something with the microbiome or at least with GI stuff that doesn't always get completely better, and we're still trying to figure out whether they need probiotics or fecal microbiota transplant or something else.

But for a lot of the autoimmune conditions, it's pretty freaking powerful. Do you think some people just in general have a little bit of trouble with higher fat? Or and or higher protein? You know, I think that some people have trouble with higher fat depending on their history. And what I've seen in my clients is that generally they're able to gradually increase fat.

And I don't know what that has to do with inadequate bile acid production. So one of the things I talk about in my book that was pretty fascinating when I was researching it was the gallstones, gallbladder stones. So this is pretty fascinating that gallstones, the main gallstone is made out of cholesterol. It's a cholesterol gallstone and gallbladder stone.

And it's made from, they're basically bile, is cholesterol, bile acids, and bilirubin. And when the concentration of bile acids goes down too low, there's too is cholesterol, bile acids, and bilirubin. And when the concentration of bile acids goes down too low, there's too much cholesterol and it can crystallize and make gallbladder stones. We lose hundreds of thousands of gallbladders every year to gallbladder disease, cholecystitis, asymptomatic or symptomatic cholecystitis. And, you know, what's crazy is that the transport of bile acids, which are made in the liver, into the little tubules that form bile and go into the gallbladder, is choline dependent. So I have a pretty strong suspicion that most gallbladder stones are due to choline deficiency because we're not pushing enough bile acids into the bile canaliculi, and that gets into the gallbladder improperly.

And there's too much cholesterol in the gallbladder, and people are making gallstones. So I think in those kind of conditions, if people are not making enough bile acids, it could potentially be a choline deficiency. And it takes time when you're eating a higher choline diet, but I do think a carnivore diet could potentially totally or significantly improve the incidence of gallbladder stones and fat malabsorption. and fat malabsorption. Most fat malabsorption has to do with inadequate bile acid production because if the bile acids can't emulsify fats, pancreatic enzymes can't act on them. But the choline thing was so striking to me because where do we get choline? Generally, it's from animal foods. You have to eat

a whole bunch, a shitload of broccoli to get enough choline to meet your RDA. And so I think that there's, I mean, just like choline is important for NAFLD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and the formation of VLDL and the export of triglycerides from the liver, I think it's also really important for the formation of proper bile. And if people were getting more animal foods,

I think we'd see gallbladder stones go way down. I know there's people listening to this that have stones in their gallbladder. That's choline deficiency until proven otherwise, in my opinion. And I think a lot of fat malabsorption and fat indigestion is choline insufficiency as well. And, again, that's going to be mostly from animal foods, specifically liver, egg yolks, things like that. Yeah, and choline also critical for brain function, which was pointed out,

one of the concerns about people putting their kids on plant-based diets. But I would say that all the things Paul has seen, I've seen too. And I really wanted that little story about the Ehlers-Danlos, just to put this because most people have never heard of this. And so this is actually a fairly common genetic collagen production deficiency. And what happens to these people is they get really loose joints. Many of them is one of the things. And this particular person was a physician.

And literally every day she would wake up with three or four joints completely dislocated. She'd have to, she'd wake up in the morning, put her ankle back in place, put her shoulder back in place. And then she'd go to work. And then more often than not, one of her joints would fall out of place at work and she'd have to put it back in at work. And this was painful because there's a lot of trauma that goes in every time. This just So she was developing arthritic pain, couldn't do much, put on weight. You know, she's in her 50s. She went on a carnivore diet. Within one month, she stopped having any more dislocations,

has not had a single dislocation in a year. She's working out, doing full squats before her knees would dislocate, which is, you can imagine that. So this is a genetic disease. And that's what shocked me because I was like, yeah, it makes sense for metabolic disease and all that stuff this is a genetic disease, and that's what shocked me because I was like, yeah, it makes sense for metabolic disease and all that stuff, but a genetic disease? And so we have to wonder if these genetic diseases are expressed more commonly in the presence of a crappy diet.

And so that was, to me, the most shocking thing I've seen. And like Paul said, these people with severe lifelong depression that have been meds on 20 years are all of a sudden, you know, they taper off their meds. They're like, I don't need my meds anymore. Life is good. I mean, these people just regain their life, which is so fascinating. You know, people with PTSD, one of the things that I think, and I'm sure Paul would agree with, we have all these people in rehab for addiction or other problems. And you go to these places and Chris, you know and Chris, when he talked about it, they feed them shit. I mean, they literally feed them

sugary garbage all day long. Yeah, he had to say he was allergic to everything, and then he got hard-boiled eggs, and they started cooking burgers without the bun and a couple things like that. The one thing that I think is unique, and I'm sure Paul has seen this, we see a lot of people that are addicted to cigarettes,

alcohol, prescription drugs drugs illicit drugs they go on a carnivore diet and within six three three six months are like man i don't need that shit anymore they don't even want it anymore which i think is also really has a potential for this tremendous i mean there's so many ways we can help people with this what about anxiety i hear a lot of people you know a lot of i hear you know modern times people talking a lot about anxiety you guys seeing some testimonials for that? Absolutely, yeah. So I did my training in psychiatry, so that kind of stuff's, you know,

kind of near and dear to my heart, though I practice more broadly now. But, yeah, I think a lot of these psychiatric illnesses are neuroinflammatory, and I've definitely seen people with anxiety that gets way better. And then they'll kind of fall off the wagon, and, you know, it's almost like it's just like one of these medical postulates. You remove something, it gets better, and you add it back, and it comes back. Like, okay, that's pretty interesting. So people will add back plant foods or high-carbohydrate foods, and they get really anxious the next day.

So yeah, you definitely see stuff with anxiety. Yeah, I think what we see, and one of the thoughts about why carnivore diet seems effective, it seems to restore this gut permeability to a normal state. We have this hyperpermeable state. We call it the so-called leaky gut. When that happens, we also have a leaky blood-brain barrier. So we have the same thing happening kind of concurrently. So that is probably causing some of these neuroinflammatory issues.

But also, and we talked about this earlier, the regulation of blood sugar. When your blood sugar is stable, your mood tends to be stable. And most people on a carnivore diet are just kind of chilled out and happy. I mean, I think that's the normal background state. And you look at these indigenous tribes. There was a book called Arctic Village written in the 1920s by a guy named Robert Marshall, I think, who was this forestry guy. It went all around the world. And he settled in this village. I think it was like Wiseman, Alaska, up in the middle of nowhere. And were just indigenous people and a few white dudes that were hanging out with them. They were all eating caribou.

That's what they lived on. He said these were the happiest people he'd ever seen in his life. I had a patient. This is an interesting story. There's a movie called The Year of the Caribou. This was like an 80-year-old woman who I did hip replacements in. woman i did hip replacements in she in the 19 late 60s early 70s spent 19 years living out in in alaska by herself with her husband and one child and they lived on literally nothing but caribou that's all they had they built their own little log cabin lived out there lived off the land

her son even died during this he fell through the ice and died but when i asked her about that experience this is long before i was a car where said, this is the happiest I was ever in my whole life. And I think it does have to do, you know, obviously with the simplification of life and all that stuff, but the food is pretty critical to mood. And I think it's, you know, we're all sitting, you know, I don't, I mean, if there's something really stressed out about, I might get, you know, pissed off, but I mean, generally it's just, it's just calm and chilled out, you know, and I think that's what we see. When I started the carnivore diet, I didn't expect it to do that. So when I started the carnivore diet a little over a year and a half ago

for my eczema, which was pretty severe, and at times I had, like, eczema tramp stamp. It was just kind of all over your body? It was all, like, lower back. I just had, like, a predilection for an eczema tramp stamp. And then I would get it on, like, my knees and my elbows. But I had the tramp stamp just kept coming back. I'm just a tramp.

And, you know, it was, but when I did it, within a few days, I had improved mood and kind of calm. And I didn't even really know that I had, I didn't really, I wouldn't even have even said that I was depressed or anxious. But it was just, there was a calm. And what I've talked about before is like my, um, my tendency to honk at somebody in traffic meter went way down. I was just really chilled out. I was like, wow, it was like the whole different glasses, you know, different colored glasses

suddenly. And that, that was a profound psychological benefit. And that's a weird thing too, too, because you don't even know it until it happens. Like you said, you didn't feel I, the whole time I gained weight and I never, I never thought I felt depressed or anxious or anything. All I know is that I, I consistently have felt better from that point since I started dropping weight. And then being on this diet, it feels like it gives me a clearer thinking. I know people throw that out there a lot.

And then everyone's like, like, is this real? Like your energy's through the roof. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Is it really through the roof? But it really is i i really feel really good every day and i i all i can really judge is that i just know that i can i feel like i can do and handle more all the time people talk about you know the mental clarity quite a bit and i think it's important i don't know how to emphasize this point for people as well that i don't think everyone understands how good they could feel right right? That's it right there. They think that

they're doing fine, but then when you make a change, which is the power of any intentional diet change, you might discover that, man, you could be even better. You know, you think you're at the ceiling, you think you're doing fine, or you think you're doing average or just okay, and then you do something. Wow, I was missing all of this extra gears that I didn't even know you had didn't even know you were a little anxious a little irritable a little sluggish in the gym you know libido's a little low or whatever you know and then that's why i think it's so important to know that like there's a lot more potential out there for a lot of us you know i went on a couple of podcasts one one with rich roll people said hey look rich roll he's crushing it and i'm thinking how much better could he be eating meat? You know, like anytime anybody says,

like, look at this vegan, they're crushing it. I think like, give him some meat and watch what happens. I mean, that's Tim Schieff, you know, an English free runner. And there's tons of people like this. You know, there are examples of athletes who are doing reasonably well without meat, but you think like, they could be doing way better.

And I think that's sort of instructive for everyone out there. Like, you know, if you're not eating a good amount of animal foods, you could probably be doing way better, you know, show me you're not going to get way better. What's up podcast. I hope you guys are enjoying this series just as much as we are. Um, thank you to everybody that's been rating and reviewing the podcast recently. We put out our bat signal and you guys have responded in droves. We seriously cannot thank you enough. It does so much for the podcast and seriously from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much. I want to take this

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